


Gunfire in Kabukicho

by changdictator



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternative Universe - Rock Band, Angst, M/M, an ode to eyeliner baekhyun, mentions of drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:08:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25121407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/changdictator/pseuds/changdictator
Summary: “If someone put a gun to your head and said, fuck Byun Baekhyun or die, would you fuck me?”Chanyeol thought about it, “Oh, probably.”(Rockstar AU -- Junior year of high school, Byun Baekhyun joins a band.)
Relationships: Byun Baekhyun/Do Kyungsoo | D.O, Byun Baekhyun/Park Chanyeol
Comments: 34
Kudos: 78





	Gunfire in Kabukicho

The story was a thousand years old. It had been burnt to a crisp by The Rolling Stone, then chewed by late-night pundits on cable TV until it was well-digested enough to trickle through the crevices of enthusiast blogs and forum threads. When all the dust settled, Paramount picked up the bits and pieces and sewed them into this humiliating half-truth, half-lie hodgepodge thing that Rotten Tomatoes later slyly dubbed “a savagely amusing piffle” under a handful of festive green splats. 

The piffle begins with an over-the-shoulder shot of how The Entire World thinks Byun Baekhyun fucked Do Kyungsoo in the chemistry lab junior year of high school. Rumors had it, for a while, that Fake Baekhyun’s grunts were what took home the Academy Award. 

Accurate or not Kyungsoo doesn’t know; he’s never managed to make it through the whole scene without making a dash for the toilet. 

## 1 

Really, the band didn’t begin with Baekhyun fucking anyone. Baekhyun wasn’t even one of the founding members. He’d only joined after Chanyeol ran out of guitarist friends and cold-called him at his step-dad’s place. Chanyeol was lucky; Baekhyun only lived with his step-dad one day of every week. 

“We offer free food,” Chanyeol had pitched. 

Baekhyun had debated it. He barely knew Chanyeol. Though they were in the same class, they ran different circles. “Um, I’m sorry, I don’t play the guitar.” 

“Oh, you will,” Chanyeol said. Baekhyun heard him laughing on the other end and it shouldn’t have, but it made him lose his grip on the phone for a second. “There's practice after school tomorrow. Let's go together.” 

Before Baekhyun could answer, Chanyeol had already hung up. 

At that point, the band didn’t have a name. It was mainly a Friends Only thing between Sehun and Jongin and Sehun’s neighbor, Kyungsoo, and Kyungsoo’s two prep-school desk-mates, Chanyeol and Junmyeon. Sehun was on second guitar, Jongin bass, Kyungsoo vocals, and Junmyeon unwilling manager-sponsor-parent-chauffeur duty. The majority of their meet-ups were practice in name only, wasted instead dicking around to dismantle each other’s stage names into endless penis references and wreck Junmyeon’s pantry. Appropriately, their debut track was named “Manager Suho and the Shitty Assholes.” 

“Guys,” Chanyeol decided, “This is totally going to be our lead to fame and success and blonde bombshells.” 

“If it becomes a hit I’m going to murder all of you and then myself,” Kyungsoo swore, “Baekhyun, tell him to stop.” 

“I’m too beautiful to die,” Baekhyun gesticulated, grinning when Chanyeol knuckled his head. 

By the end of the year, the title had been forgotten, replaced instead by a band name which took Kyungsoo and Junmyeon several nights in the library, and which Sehun and Jongin claimed they could never understand. Baekhyun liked it. EXO, in all capitals. He didn’t understand what it meant, either, which was probably why he liked it. 

“EXO, we are one!” Chanyeol shouted gleefully at the end of the school festival, “Please anticipate our next song!” 

## 2 

Baekhyun sucked at the guitar. He wasn't invested in music, not the way that Jongin or Sehun were. He composed, occasionally, but he wasn't great. There were other things he could’ve done, and once or twice he did consider watching Jongdae’s Friday football practices instead. But then Chanyeol would always pop out of nowhere and ruffle his hair, and like that, Baekhyun’d be gone, somehow, before he knew it himself, in dust and in ashes, suspended mid-air, caught in Chanyeol's hair, in Chanyeol's fingers, in the spaces between Chanyeol's lashes. 

They were seventeen then. At that age, with a kick of testosterone and raging loneliness, it was easy to fall in love with anyone. 

“I like you,” Kyungsoo announced, flat and frank and brave, in only the way Kyungsoo could be, in the washroom during lunch break. It was just the two of them, and a herd of girls chattering as they passed outside. Baekhyun wondered if he should feel surprised, or at least act more than he felt. 

“I’m not gay,” Baekhyun muttered, soaping his hands without looking up.The sun nestled in the crook of Baekhyun’s neck, hot and cloying. “Stop kidding around. That’s not funny.” 

“I know you like Chanyeol, but you shouldn’t. He's got a girlfriend,” Kyungsoo said. Twenty years later, staring up at his molded, cracking ceiling Baekhyun would still remember that dark silhouette of Kyungsoo’s against the sun, pitch black and sharp and terrifying, his august eyes, the tempo of his voice. 

“Chanyeol,” Baekhyun asked that day on their walk to practice, “Hey, do you have a girlfriend?” 

Chanyeol, who’d been a few steps in front of him, slowed and turned and messed with Baekhyun’s hair and said, “Yeah, I met her through my noona. What, you want me to hook you up too?” 

“No, my mom won’t allow me,” Baekhyun lied. 

And the following Monday he kissed Kyungsoo. As Paramount would later announce to the world, he fucked him in the back of the chemistry lab. That was probably when he began to avoid Kyungsoo.

## 3 

On the first day of senior year, Junmyeon rounded up the guys and announced, “So you know this but my dad’s a judge and I... just, you can’t meet here any more. I’m sorry. I need to study.” 

“You’re still our manager, right?” Sehun had asked, halfway-hopeful. 

Junmyeon smiled and told them politely to get the fuck out. And thus, eleven months and a day into their formation, a couple weeks before the indie music competition Jongin had been eyeing, EXO disbanded on Junmyeon’s doorstep. 

Baekhyun went home and thought about the crestfallen grimace Chanyeol had tried to hide on their way to the bus. Then he dialled Chanyeol’s home number. It was the first time he’d called Chanyeol, and it was strange, listening to the ring-tone, waiting for him to answer, wondering if he would. Baekhyun was lucky. 

“Hello?” Chanyeol picked up, his voice buried in the static. There was shouting and the sound of dinner in the background. 

“We’re recruiting a drummer for a dream band, are you interested?” 

“Who’s we?” Chanyeol asked. 

Baekhyun twisted the telephone wire round and round and round his fingers and then whispered, mouth dry, “You and me. There will be free food aplenty.” 

When Chanyeol laughed, Baekhyun was so happy he nearly cried. 

## 4 

No one expected Kyungsoo to return to EXO, least of all Baekhyun, but he did anyway. Kyungsoo was like that. 

“I won’t like you more just because you hang around me all the time,” Baekhyun announced backstage their first gig, opening for DBSK. 

Kyungsoo didn’t even flinch, gaze fixed solid on tuning his acoustic. “You don’t know that. I could have magic love powers.” He wiggled his fingers and peered up at Baekhyun, grinning ear to ear. 

Baekhyun met his eyes for a second, something cold and foreign stirring in his guts, a jerk and a twist, and wondered if Chanyeol would feel the same towards him if he knew. Summed up, all the things he knew about Chanyeol circled back to circumstantial speculations, like how Park Chanyeol could look right through someone without ever really looking at them, how he could hurt you just by standing next to you, how he would make you fall and fall and fall and never really understand that people break. People break, when they fall so hard for someone and are never caught. 

EXO’s first few years were rocky. Baekhyun worked nights bagging groceries while Kyungsoo part-timed at university and Sehun and Jongin whined and cheated their way through the college entrance exams they were going to fail anyway. They had a few decent songs, just enough to sign them into a mediocre indie label with a couple of sub-par music videos and one expectedly unexciting debut single, MAMA. During that time, Chanyeol flitted endlessly between girlfriends. In response Baekhyun picked up smoking, then quit, then picked it up again; at that point it had felt as if he had entered a deep tunnel, no lights ahead, no lights behind, carrying nothing but the vague notion—or hope, just hope—that there was an exit, somewhere in there, if he could run fast enough, if he knew where to go. 

Then, one day out of the blue, it came. 

“Oh my god,” was all that Chanyeol could say when he first heard it, “Oh my god, Baekhyun, oh my god. I love you, Jesus Christ, I love you so fucking much.” 

The day after Sehun and Jongin graduated, they took a week to record the track, then re-record and edit and re-record and re-mix it, and by the end of the month Growl charted at number one. Then, not ironically, Overdose a month later. Nearly overnight came the magazine covers and the sold-out concerts and the endless entourage of stylists and producers and assistants and managers and all the things Baekhyun had never knew he wanted, never knew he was allowed to want. 

His first paycheck came in at two and a half million dollars. There were so many zeroes that Baekhyun had to sit down and count it twice, and then again with Kyungsoo’s help. He had never seen so much money in his life before. 

“I’m rich,” Baekhyun murmured, in awe. 

“You’re rich,” Kyungsoo confirmed, and even then it was so overwhelming that it felt like free-fall, like that second before gravity tears you down and apart, the crushing height and joy of it a dead weight, and it scared Baekhyun to the very core. 

“What am I going to do?” Baekhyun asked, “What do you do with all this money?” 

“Treat me to McDonalds,” Kyungsoo suggested. 

Baekhyun bought him a box of twelve-piece chicken nuggets. Then he drove Kyungsoo home, pat him on the head, and on his way to Chanyeol’s hotel bought out a whorehouse and a trunk full of vodka and heroin and whatever else he could get his hands on. He could never remember what exactly happened after he passed out in a pool of his own vomit, but it was nice to imagine that afterwards Chanyeol had mistaken him for one of the girls and fucked him hard and needy in the ass, knees grinding puddles of cash and cocaine, mouth on his ear, grunting out things he’ll never hear again. Baekhyun liked to imagine that, years later, Chanyeol would think back to that night and remember—anything, really. 

The reality was that, according to Paramount, years later Chanyeol would check himself into rehab for heroin addicts. 

## 5 

The summer after they released Monster, success filled Baekhyun so full of bullshit bravado that he kissed Chanyeol in the middle of a concert at Budokan. The fans screamed and Chanyeol laughed like it was funny, like he never knew Baekhyun had always only looked at him, and Baekhyun had to remind himself that, right, Chanyeol had married months ago, that he was godfather to some fetus Chanyeol sung to every night, that Chanyeol was just a question without an answer, a rollercoaster ride that stopped two inches past the top. 

_Broken heart, bleeding lips,_ Kyungsoo penned in his lyrics notebook, _Loving you is like_ _running on beds of glass._

_Unless you smoke, snort, and inject your way through it_ , Baekhyun scribbled underneath. 

## 6 

Six years passed in this massive, consuming campaign of sex and darkness that never slept. They released three more albums and nineteen singles, topped all of the charts there were to top. Hour-long compilations of Chanyeol thanking the wrong award at ceremonies, or Jongin forgetting to show up altogether, trended on social media, over civil rights movements and political campaigns. Music was never difficult, in and of itself. Kyungsoo and Baekhyun wrote most of the songs together. Kyungsoo was good at piecing things together, sniping down Jongin’s excessively ambitious bass solos and doubling Baekhyun back on Sehun until they fit like a glove. Chanyeol volunteered to write lyrics sometimes, which was a little funny and a little sad, him putting words into Kyungsoo’s mouth of all people. 

Sometimes Baekhyun fucked Kyungsoo just because they both knew it wouldn’t be out of love. It wasn’t nice of him, but sometimes he pretended that he could love Kyungsoo. Maybe a part of him wanted to see how it would feel to love someone who loved you back in the same way. 

“How are the band dynamics? Do you hang out outside of work?” was a popular interview point. 

“We’re friends,” Kyungsoo liked to answer, “We started the band as friends, so naturally we would hang out together.” It was the biggest fucking fib in the history of fibs. Naturally, Baekhyun believed it. 

## 7 

“If no one would ever find out, would you fuck my sister?” 

“Loaded question, Baekhyun.” 

“Then would you fuck me?” 

“What?” 

“If someone put a gun to your head and said, _fuck Byun Baekhyun or die_ , would you fuck me?” 

Chanyeol thought about it, “Oh, probably.” 

Baekhyun put a gun to his head. It was just a leftover stage prop and they both knew it was, but it was 9AM in Kabukicho and they were so fucking shitfaced from hopping morning bars that Chanyeol actually unzipped his jeans and Baekhyun opened his legs and then, there in the alley between a no-name host-club and an combini, was the longest pause of Baekhyun’s life. 

“I can’t get it up,” Chanyeol laughed, words slurred, smelling like a distillery, “Sorry, guess you’ve got to shoot me,” and placed a wet kiss on one of Baekhyun’s bare, cold thighs before he passed out right there in the alley. 

Baekhyun dragged Chanyeol back to the nearest love-hotel. He tucked him in and wiped off the vomit and make-up caked over his cheeks and contemplated kissing him. He kept contemplating it, all the way until he fell asleep right there next to Chanyeol, with his hands curled over Chanyeol's chest. 

## 8 

The day Jongin said he wanted to quit the band, Kyungsoo was home with a cold and Chanyeol was out at a photoshoot. Their last album had flopped. They’d cancelled a tour because Sehun didn't like that BTS had booked a bigger venue in Paris, and to finish it all off, SM fined them fifty million dollars for some sort of small-font contract violation. 

“Fifteen years is long enough,” Jongin said. Baekhyun stared at his lip ring. He hadn't been aware Jongin had a lip-piercing. Then again, he hadn't been aware either that his top seed fan-site master rebranded herself under Jeon something-kook, years ago. 

“What about you?” Baekhyun asked Sehun. 

“I don’t know,” Sehun said. For a second Baekhyun tried to imagine a three-membered band, just him and Kyungsoo and Chanyeol. It seemed plausible, like a three-legged stool. If they tried really hard it might work out. Then his thoughts wandered back to the time they first got together, when they used to be sixteen and friends, and for the life of him he couldn’t fathom how they stopped. 

“What about music? What are you going to do?” 

“Since when did you start caring about music?” Jongin barked, then softened and rubbed Baekhyun's shoulder, “I'm sorry, hyung, I didn't mean that,” and he smiled and stood and was gone. Sehun watched him leave, and then exhaled and suddenly, Baekhyun was alone in their enormous studio. All that there was left was the sound of his own strangled breathing, his fingers chattering and the rings he wore clacking against the counter, the noisy hum of the AC smothering everything into a thick throbbing headache. He must have sat there for hours, spacing out, fallen asleep and woken up again and continued sitting there, waiting for someone to show up and tell him that it was a joke and that they had to record something. Except the only thing that showed up was Kyungsoo's caller ID on his cell. 

Kyungsoo said, steadily in his interview voice, with measured words, that he quit too, and that his lawyer would be in touch with the recording company and that he’d take care of everyone. 

“You have a lawyer?” 

“Junmyeon was the one who bailed you out of jail that one time you were in for assault. You forgot, didn’t you?” 

Baekhyun snorted. So it turned out that some guy who’d left EXO before it even started knew more about them than Baekhyun did. But it didn’t upset him; he’d seen it coming, really—he was never really part of this, not since the very beginning when Chanyeol dug him out of the back of the school directory just because his last name was the first on the list. As Kyungsoo said, EXO was a band of friends, plus Baekhyun. 

## 9 

When the news first hit the papers, there was a split second where everyone seemed to remember what EXO was again. Their names splashed into the tabloids and late-night cable channels, talk- shows and radios, dragging behind them a hurricane of gossip and tin-foiled hats. A blink later the cameras stopped again, this time for good. Everything began to vanish, the glamour, the gratification, the grating self-loathing, no matter how hard he reached out for them. In the end all Baekhyun had left was Chanyeol on his speed dial. 

Chanyeol died the next day. 

His wife found him lying on the porch chair, his eyes closed like he had been sleeping. The cops ruled it out as an accident, even if everyone knew heroin addicts don’t overdose on _accident_. 

Within a year there were three separate TV documentaries about Chanyeol’s life. Baekhyun didn’t watch a single one. 

## 10 

Another blink and Baekhyun was forty with thirty extra pounds on his belly and greying hair that he dyed black with cheap supermarket treatments. Wikipedia reported that he had gone “solo”, some euphemism for a living made off shit remixes and pissing over his pride to foot the endless slew of bills for the army of things he didn’t need and never used. Then time slowed. Time always slowed when it shouldn’t have, like that afternoon when Junmyeon gathered all of them up on his doorstep and Sehun asked, “Will you still be our manager?” like Junmyeon was all he had left, like Junmyeon was the one pillar he could lean on. Time slowed, and Junmyeon couldn’t open his mouth, and Sehun pretended that he wasn’t crying, and suddenly Baekhyun became old and very tired. 

At some point, his manager checked him into rehab. Baekhyun wasn’t sure what his mental hang-up was but he went along anyway, and when Kyungsoo came to pick him up he said, “Your manager told me to tell you that his contract expired and he doesn't want you to hire him again.” 

With nothing else left to do, Baekhyun checked into rehab again and Kyungsoo picked him up again, and again and again. Each time on their drive back, Baekhyun would look at Kyungsoo like he was an old friend, like Kyungsoo was all he had left, was the one pillar he could lean on. Kyungsoo smiled, just like Junmyeon did. It's always funny how people could be so similar, sometimes. They talked about the old times, back when Sehun and Jongin had rented out a beach and went skinny-dipping in all four square miles of it, or that one day when they’d finished recording Growl and knew that they’d made it big, knew it in the throb of blood through their palms and the lukewarm shock of electricity curling in their guts. 

Occasionally, they talked about how they used to fuck, how terrible they were in bed, like doctors reminiscing over the odd symptoms of a dead patient. 

“I found this the other day,” Kyungsoo said one time and pulled a remix CD that Baekhyun’d thrown together for grocery money.

“Where, at the bottom of some garage sale box?” Baekhyun quipped, quickly tossing the disc away as if it could hurt him if he held it long enough. It probably could. 

“Ah,” Kyungsoo started, and never continued. 

Baekhyun understood that the truth of the matter was that, in time, those CDs would move from liquidation to recycling, and die there in a long, deflating whimper of a death. But something like that hardly seemed like it could be real. “Do you think things could’ve turned out different? Like if, I don’t know, if our last two albums had done better, would we still be together?” 

“Everything ends,” Kyungsoo would shrug. “Maybe you should let go, Baekhyun.” 

And like that, time stopped. Kyungsoo dropped Baekhyun at the corner of the bus station so he could go on to his desk job stapling papers for kids half his age. Baekhyun sat on the greasy, peeling plastic benches. There was the sun again, burning into his neck. When he closed his eyes, he was twenty years old and he was waiting for Chanyeol, and when the next bus came Chanyeol stepped out and saw him and ruffled his hair and kissed him and laughed, like he always did. In this version, Chanyeol was his boyfriend. Chanyeol would never die. 

And Chanyeol said, “Hey, hello, I love you,” and Baekhyun would believe him, because he was twenty years old, and he was irredeemably in love. 

## 11 

Sometimes Baekhyun pulled out all of EXO’s old tour DVDs, lined them up chronologically, and marathoned them until he had it crystallized in memory, the lights frozen in the knots of their smiles, Jongin’s runny eyeliner and Chanyeol's poodle hair and Sehun's poker-faced bass riffs and Kyungsoo a misplaced five-year old in leather pants. He could close his eyes and play that image over and over in his head, again and again and again, the sound of his voice tailing Kyungsoo’s chorus, the memory of Chanyeol's arm like an anchor around his shoulder, grounding him, pulling him back. 

Sometimes he took a needle to the arm and went up to the stage where he could feel the bass thrumming over his skin and the violet and green lights beating down on his forehead and the guitar strap pressing into his shoulder. There on the stage there were no bills to be paid, no debts to be considered, no paperwork to be done. There on the stage was only him, and Chanyeol, and a world that went on forever. 

It’d always feel like shit after the high was over, but Baekhyun would just crawl up again, back to where he belonged. 

One morning he went up higher than he'd ever been before, just a little short of that time they'd performed to a sold-out crowd in Madison Square, so high that when he closed his eyes he could hear Chanyeol calling out to him, feel Chanyeol’s hand ghosting around his arm, his thigh, pulling him close, pulling him down. 

## 12 

The cops discover him four months afterwards, when the landlord's filing for eviction and notices the rotten smell leaking out his door. 

And thus the world finds Byun Baekhyun, sixty-four years old, sprawled out on the carpet, the TV still on and flickering, half-naked, fingers curled in as if he were readying for stage again. Only no one really remembers who he is at this point. The movie about EXO’s rise and fall had been two decades ago; Growl happened three decades ago. There is no cover story. No one particularly cares. 

Kyungsoo hears about it only two years later, through a friend of a friend, but even then, he isn’t sure where they’d buried Baekhyun and he doesn’t try to find out. Instead he borrows a copy of the Paramount movie that he could never finish and tries watching it again.

It starts off with Byun Baekhyun sitting on one of the old chemistry lab stools, his hands cupping Kyungsoo’s jaws, whispering something too silently to be heard, a smile at the corner of his lips. 

**Author's Note:**

> yes, it is indeed me, a duck, reposting old fic ♥


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